Borges born 115 years ago today. Dig these. What did you think ESPN would do when Helmetball said JUMP! said L to K at a special Friday Night Edition of Thursday Night Pints when K offered the story as shuttlecock of a friendly rally. It's the times, I said to K, bruised, everybody's pissed at everybody but mostly pissed at the people they most like and agree with 99.94% of the time. L said, I see what you did there. My phone chirped. A blog friend emailed me, she asked - this is true, she can vouch, or choose not to - and I paraphrase, what the fuck is the Kind? I texted my bud bleggal and existential context in one or two sentence each. I loved With, said L - the Donald Harington novel where Kind has Borgesian onion layers of meaning. If you and me are Kind - I'm talking to you now - I'll buy you a copy of that amazing novel. L's lending K the one I gave her. I've been promising you, I didn't say last night, I'm talking to you now D, love, the traditional Bonnie Prince Billy cascade.
- Yes, I play that all the time.
- Fuck The Guardian, Long Live the Independent?
- I got a good scrubbing from four to five this morning by either an individual or a bot from Heimat Sicherheitsdeinst Geschäftsstelle linking from the above blogfriend.
- Making sense from Snowden.
- Why look here? The jerk is in your hands.
- What is totalitarianism today?
- Harassment is about power.
- On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.
- Logistics and opposition.
- Death to the either/or and all, but really, is this more Obama thinks you're stupid or Obama is saying Kiss my ass?
- Yes, posting on Saturday's in August is proof of compulsive and futile attention sluttery.
- On DC history and equality by a friend of mine.
- BRT.
- BRT.
- What you can buy me for my birthday.
- ZOMG! The Vegans! An argument for. I'm not near, I'm working on in, not to worry, long-timers and loyalists, I'll not be documenting progress towards or retreat from, but I do have a goal.
- Vegan Symphony #9.
- 100 free classics. I just finished Silas Marner last night, I forget to bring Vollmann, in the college book store was a Dover edition for $2.50, 150 pages later I remember what I like about Eliot (for intance, her brilliant use of English in her exquisitely constructed aphorisms of moral scolding) and what I didn't like (for instance, the moral scolding).
- The rage for order.
- Raskolnikov in Afghanistan?
- I am alive.
- Monk, not Meredith per usual, another one.
- Julianne Barwick interview. Yes, the Evening Planet post will return when one or both of us need it.
- On Caberet Voltaire.
A COMPASS
Jorge Luis Borges
translated by Robert Mezey
All things are words belonging to that language
In which Someone or Something, night and day,
Writes down the infinite babble that is, per se,
The history of the world. And in that hodgepodge
Both Rome and Carthage, he and you and I,
My life that I don't grasp, this painful load
Of being riddle, randomness, or code,
And all of Babel's gibberish streams by.
Behind the name is that which has no name;
Today I have felt its shadow gravitate
In this blue needle, in its trembling sweep
Casting its influence toward the farthest strait,
With something of a clock glimpsed in a dream
And something of a bird that stirs in its sleep.
